Microsoft Director of Product Planning Speaks About Advertising On Xbox One

Albert Penello clarifies NUad and addresses concerns.

Yesterday in a neogaf“>Neogaf thread discussing the increase of GPU speed for the Xbox One, the topic at one point switched the the potential for advertising space on the Xbox One’s Dashboard. One poster asked for specific information regarding NUad. Microsoft’s director of product planning, Albert Panello responded to the request:

“Well I think there’s two things you’re asking. NuAds by definition is simply interactive advertising done on the platform. Using the functions of the console and Kinect to interact vs. just watching a spot. There’s nothing particularly interesting happening here unless you’re in the advertising business, and we’ve done a few on Xbox 360 today.

“What I think you’re asking about is an interview done earlier in the year where someone was talking about how some of the new Xbox One Kinect features *could* be used in advertising – since we can see expressions, engagement, etc. and how that might be used to target advertising. This is the point that seems to draw some controversy.

“First – nobody is working on that. We have a lot more interesting and pressing things to dedicate time towards. It was an interview done speculatively, and I’m not aware of any active work in this space.

“Second – if something like that ever happened, you can be sure it wouldn’t happen without the user having control over it. Period.

“Two examples of how we deal with similar things today:

“First, Kinect can recognize your face and log you in automatically. There could be some cool features we could enable if we stored that data in the cloud, like being able to be auto-recognized at a friend’s. I get asked for that feature a lot. But, for privacy reasons, your facial data doesn’t leave the console.

“Second: You’ll see us do some things around Skype that freezes the video when Skype is not in focus (meaning, it’s not the primary app). If you go back to the home screen, or launch another app, we actually stop the video stream. We do this so the user can’t even ACCIDENTALLY have the video stream going on in the background.

“I’ll say this – we take a lot of heat around stuff we’ve done and I can roll with it. Some of it is deserved. But preventing Kinect from being used inappropriately is something the team takes very seriously. Hope that helps.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments below.